Coaching Materials

Most youth sports organizations have a similar mission: offer a fun and rewarding experience, while incrementally teaching the fundamentals with age appropriate teachings. The challenge is that most groups of parent and other volunteer coaches have a HUGE variety of sport specific knowledge and coaching ability. In today's over-scheduled world, parent coaches have very little free time and are unfortunately taking less initiative to prepare for practices...and it's getting a LOT harder to recruit enough coaches. Our benchmarking survey of over 300 youth organizations in the U.S. highlighted that Preparing Volunteer Coaches was by far and away the #1 Challenge, mentioned by 85% of program directors.

Given these challenges, it's become much more difficult for a youth organization to offer a high quality and consistent program to the community. Success involves getting coaches to "buy into" the program mission, and providing them with sport specific knowledge and coaching materials to be effective. Unfortunately, most organizations are still using antiquated and ineffective methods to try to prepare coaches in an environment that is only getting more difficult - coaches have less time to prepare, can't make the pre-season meeting, and are now expecting help in the form of simple, mobile tools. It's no wonder preparing volunteer coaches has become the biggest challenge.

The Coaching Material Packages available on CoachSpan use an innovative, 4th Generation approach to preparing youth coaches to teach sport specific fundamentals. Each package is based on a multi-stage skill curriculum that keeps the focus on fun and effective ways to teach the fundamentals that are most appropriate for each age group. These coaching materials help coaches incrementally advance fundamental skills from PK through 9th grade. To learn more, please see the video below, check out the coach testimonials at the bottom of this page, and visit the sub page(s) corresponding to the sport(s) that your organization offers (via the Coaching Materials drop down menu).